Read Online Grist 04 - Incinerator by Timothy Hallinan - Free Book Online

here.” The desk clerk was a motherly type in her middle forties who had chosen to celebrate Sunday by pinning a large, purple, vaguely vulpine orchid to her left lapel. The desk clerk shook her head sympathetically, and the orchid stuck its purple-specked tongue out at me.
    “Perhaps she left a message,” I said. “My name is Grist.”
    “Well, perhaps she did.” The desk clerk sounded as though she disapproved of the fact that she hadn’t thought of that on her own. “Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps,” she sang to herself on a descending scale as she flipped through a stack of envelopes. “Whoopsy-daisy, here we are.” She started to hand me an envelope and then pulled back her hand and regarded me suspiciously. She pursed her mouth, working out the protocol. “Mr. Simeon Grist?” she asked, the picture of vigilance.
    “Yes.”
    “All right, then. This is for you.” She smiled maternally and handed me the envelope.
    “Look,” I said, “you did that all wrong.”
    “How do you mean, dearie?” I wondered what I’d done to become “dearie.” “Miss Winston said to give it only to Simeon Grist, and that’s what I did.” Her blue eyes were as open as the Canadian border.
    “Never mind,” I said. “Love the orchid.”
    Annabelle Winston’s note was an address: 13731 Moorpark, Sherman Oaks. Beneath that she’d written, Ten till six. There was no phone number.
    “Well, shit,” I said out loud. Sherman Oaks was a long way to drive just to quit a case.
    “Icky, icky,” said the desk clerk behind me. “There’s no need for such language.” The way she was looking at me, I was no longer “dearie.”
    “You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry. I have no breeding at all.”
    I took Laurel Canyon up over the top of the Hollywood Hills. Rainbirds chopped at the air like machine guns, shooting out long, glittering arcs of water. People were keeping the foliage green just in case, a perfect example of baseless optimism. A really hot fire creates its own winds, and the winds always blow up. Given enough momentum, a brushfire can move up a hill at twenty miles an hour, exploding everything in its path. A nice green lawn offers about as much protection as drawing the Venetian blinds.
    The San Fernando Valley was 8 to 10 degrees hotter than the other side of the hills, making it around 100. The Santa Anas had shouldered the smog out over the Pacific, and the Valley spread below me like the world’s biggest, driest sink.
    The Moorpark address was a small hospital, obviously private, a cluster of low white buildings sheltered from the slanting afternoon sunlight by tall eucalyptus trees. There were lots of visitors’ spaces, most of them empty. I pulled Alice into one and left her there, a bright blue blemish on the asphalt.
    The starched, crinkly-white imitation nurse wrapped an expensive smile around the information that Mr. Winston was in 312 and that Miss Winston was with him and that I should follow the yellow line. Sure enough, there was a yellow line on the floor. There were also blue and red lines. Fighting down an obscure desire to find out where the red line went, I followed the yellow one down a long, arctically air-conditioned corridor and around a corner. There, seated on a black leather couch with chromium armrests, was Annabelle Winston.
    She wasn’t alone. With her was a youngish man who was clearly working at looking youngisher. His dark, wet-looking hair was combed straight back from a high, tanned forehead. His eyes were too close together, but he had fine bones and a broad mouth with a little too much lower lip. It looked as though he’d pouted once too often as a boy and the expression had stuck, just as my mother always predicted my eyes would when I crossed them. He was holding Annabelle’s hand in what seemed to be a brotherly fashion.
    The two of them got up together as I rounded the corner. Annabelle extracted her hand from the man’s grasp and said, “Mr. Grist. Thank you for